MIT researcher Nathan Eagle regaled the audience at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference yesterday with tales of technical innovation from East Africa. “Kenya has some mobile phone services that are years ahead of what we have right now,” he said. Eagle was at ETech to present his new startup, Txteagle, which aims to be a kind of mobile Mechanical Turk, using countless mobile phone users in Kenya and beyond to solve easy tasks and earn small amounts of money in return. (There’s a good writeup in Wired News today)

It’s definitely an interesting idea. But to me, the real story is how mobile phones have transformed a country like Kenya in recent years, making not only services like Txteagle possible, but also shaking up the region’s entire economic system. Continue »

The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennett, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.” Continue »

Brand Asset Digital launched its P2P advertising platform P2Pwords today, promising to bring pay-per-click advertising to file-sharing networks like Limewire, Gnutella and Emule. The NY-based company received a largely positive review from John Healey over at The LA Times Bitplayer blog, who thinks that “the opportunity presented by P2Pwords is so large, it may be hard for advertisers to resist.”

The combination of file sharing and advertising is definitely an interesting one. File-sharing networks attract millions of users. It’s becoming clearer every day that the entertainment industry’s shock-and-awe lawsuits just don’t work, which is why many look for other ways to monetize P2P. Still, it’s a good idea to approach these early trials with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, Skyrider, another company that promised to marry search ads with P2P networks just closed its doors last week after burning through $25 million in funding. Continue »

Fire Eagle lead developer Tom Coates just announced at the ETech conference that Yahoo is launching Fire Eagle for developers today. Fire Eagle is meant to be a location broker that collects location information from a variety of services and devices and makes them available to other platforms. Fire Eagle offers open APIs both for data input and output, which means the service will coexist and possibly even enrich other location platforms. One of the first services plugging into Fire Eagle will be Dopplr.

The beta test is still invite-only, but you can sign up for one on the Fire Eagle web site. Coates said that 10,000 invitations were sent out today, and more will be available soon. Invited users also get a handful of invites to give away. Here are some screenshots:

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Yahoo’s location based service enabler FireEagle is entering it’s beta testing phase today with an official announcement at ETech. The new web site of the service is still featuring an invite form, just as the alpha version did, so it might still be a limited beta test, or maybe someone still has to flip the switch. We will know more once FireEagle lead developer Tom Coates climbs on the ETech stage for his Fire Eagle keynote, which should be around 9.30am PST.

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, the first keynote speaker of the two-day Graphing Social Patterns West conference that started today in San Diego, said that if she held the keys to the Facebook empire, she would make the social graph open. “Not just the applications,” she told me, “but I would make it Facebook everywhere.”

Her comments were part of a one-on-one conversation following her keynote, during which she laid out what social networks would look like 10 years from now. Subsequent presenters were then forced to explain why their own were still so far off from Li’s vision.

Facebook’s Ben Ling, for example, told the audience that users don’t really want complete data portability. No wonder things are moving along slowly. Li still thinks that we will see some major changes this year, though she cautioned that we won’t see the ubiquitous social network that centers around your email as the constant of your social graph. That, she said, will most likely play out on a large portal site, but not for another five or so.

So how could we speed this whole process up? Well, if she were calling the shots at Facebook, “I would make my social graph open,” Li told me. And not just the applications.

I would preempt all the portals in saying: Instead of using their social map, I’m going to enable you to import your social map into Facebook, and then take it anywhere else you want. If you want to put your social graph in LinkedIn, press a button. You want to upload your Gmail email relationships from a Pop account? And I’m not going to look at the content, I’m just looking at who you are emailing and map those relationships for you that way by email address. They would preempt every single other player from being able to do that. They will keep all those early adopters and pioneers from going some place else to do that aggregation.

Mark, are you listening?